As many of my friends are watching the recent season of Game of Thrones, I would like to research the software that light up the VFX of the series. The newest season was using Katana 3 to light up the scenes more efficiently.

Rodeo is responsible for some of the biggest sequences seen in HBO’s series. They’ve always used Katana as their lighting tool, but more recently (the end of May 2018) they changed to the newest version of the software. It gives them many new possibilities and speed up the production process.

Some of the GoT’s scenes that give the producers a challenge include:

• lighting up a city of Mereen (day and night circle)
• ships being set aflame

With the use of Katana, the developers were able to get through those sequences without a problem. Katana is designed to save time while creating, editing and manipulating lighting and light filters.

The Katana 3.1 was now released and improved many aspects of it’s previous version. The viewport have it’s modernisation, faster rendering with 3DelightNSI, the performance of scene processing improved. This is a short list of what’s new for the artists that uses the software.

Such a nice and useful software can’t be available for free. The official website lets the users to try Katana for free for 30 days and doesn’t shows the full price of the product. However, the developers sells others for a high price, so I can only assume that this software is pricey as well.

This software could be implemented into my own workflow, although it’s more commonly used within the character artists or in VFX industry. There are many environment artists who uses this software as well, as it allow lit the scene with and without additional lighting sources. This could improve my final renders and trailers, so I may at some point download the trial version and experiment with the software.

REFERENCE LIST:

Foundry team, (2018), Katana features., Foundry., [ONLINE]. Available at:
https://www.foundry.com/products/katana/features# (Accessed: 22 April 2019)

3D Artist team, (2018), Lighting the Seven, 3D Artist [magazine]. Issue 122, p. 88